problems, solutions and general blabber about computers and interesting stuff.
as seen by yours truly.

May 19, 2009

openwig news

Well well well. It sure has been a long time.Today i have released a new and improved experimental version 0.3.90 (yup, that means pre-0.4), codenamed "Threadless". Why? Well, it's not because it makes t-shirts. It's because it doesn't use threads. Not too much of them, anyway.

Before this release, OpenWIG relied on threads for event synchronization. Whenever I needed to call an event handler, I spawned a thread that would perform the Lua code and die. Which is all good and nice, but can bring a lot of trouble. For one, when you use many threads, you need to care about (dead)locking. For two, some j2me implementations are somewhat inferior to the rest *cough*Symbian*cough*. Their garbage collection is simply not good enough. So it's better not to create too many objects, if you know what i mean.Also, for the same reason, there is now a pre-allocated instance of each of the screen types (like "item details", "zone navigation", "dialog" etc.) and no new screens are created.

Oh, and screen switching is now stateless. That means that each screen knows in advance which screens can follow it. And that's cool! Lots of problems with screen refreshing disappeared this way.And lot of them appeared. Oh well, for every bug you fix, three new are born.

In other news, we now have the latest and greatest Kahlua revision, which means that we support more obscure code. Inventories and AllZObjects are now accessible from Lua as tables. And some minor thingies, i don't remember exactly.